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RECENT NEWS COVERAGE: June 4, 2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Star Wars II: Here We Go Again If you stopped worrying about the bomb when the Cold War ended, you were probably surprised to learn that two hot-button issues of the 1980s — nuclear arms control and missile defense — are high on the agenda for the Clinton/Putin summit scheduled to begin June 4th. The central issue in Moscow will be how to reconcile Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for deep cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals with the Clinton administration’s fixation on developing a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. As Clinton heads to Moscow to try to overcome Putin’s opposition to modifying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow for a limited U.S. defensive shield, he faces strong opposition back home. Late last week, in a transparent attempt to steal Clinton and Gore’s thunder in the run-up to the summit, George W. Bush proposed a new, unilateralist nuclear doctrine that would demolish the foundations of international arms control in favor of an approach in which the United States would make unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal and aggressively pursue an elaborate, costly missile defense system comparable in scope to Reagan’s original Star Wars vision. This strange bipartisan consensus in favor of deploying a missile defense system is a national security disaster in the making. Both Clinton’s limited NMD system and George W. Bush’s “Star Wars II” plan are unnecessary, unworkable, unaffordable and unwise. An NMD system is unnecessary because even top U.S. intelligence analysts now admit that North Korea’s missile program has been on hold for nearly two years, and that Iran’s program has made no progress over that same time span (these two countries are the designated “rogue states” that the Pentagon’s NMD system is allegedly being rushed full speed ahead to deal with). The system is unworkable because $70 billion and 17 years after Reagan’s Star Wars speech, the Pentagon has yet to produce a single reliable device, leading to serious doubts about whether the system is even technically feasible. It’s unaffordable because the costs — which range from $60 billion for the Clinton/Gore plan to up to $240 billion for the more lavish Bush model — are far more than the country can afford, given other pressing national needs. Most important, deploying an NMD system is unwise. As a top U.S. intelligence analyst put it in a recent interview, deploying a missile defense system is likely to provoke “an unsettling series of political and military ripple effects . . . that would include a sharp build-up of strategic and medium-range missiles by China, India and Pakistan and the further spread of military technology in the Middle East.” Deploying an NMD system will also derail President Putin’s proposal to lock in deep cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, thereby throwing away our best chance in a generation to reduce radically the global nuclear threat. It it’s such a bad idea, why is official Washington rushing ahead with missile defenses? Because the Clinton administration and its conservative adversaries in Congress and the Bush campaign are playing politics with the missile defense issue. The mad rush toward missile defense is being propelled by the three C’s of contemporary American politics: conservative ideology, Clintonian cowardice and corporate influence. The de facto nerve center of the missile defense lobby is Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a small but effective right-wing think tank whose board of advisors includes a virtual who’s who of missile defense boosters, including representatives of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, missile defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and pro-NMD members of Congress like Sen. Jon Kyl, R-AZ, and Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA. Gaffney’s center — which receives funding from far-right stalwarts like the Scaife, Coors and Krieble families and major missile defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and TRW — is the main vehicle for conservative media outreach, legislative strategy and public advocacy on NMD. Every major milestone in the NMD debate — from the inclusion of NMD in Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America to the creation of the Rumsfeld Commission, which put forth an extreme worst-case scenario with respect to the alleged North Korean missile threat — has been influenced by Gaffney or his network, including “faithful” supporters like Donald Rumsfeld himself, who is repeatedly singled out for praise in the center’s literature. Once Gaffney and his cohorts unified the Republican Party around their missile defense dogma, Bill Clinton and Al Gore tried to co-op the issue by throwing money at NMD research and promising to seek deployment at a later date. Unfortunately for Gore, that “later date” is right now. If Clinton doesn’t use the Moscow summit to detach himself from his self-imposed commitment to developing a dangerously destabilizing missile defense system, he will go down in history as the only U.S. president of the atomic age to fail to negotiate a single significant arms-control agreement. If that happens, Clinton will leave a legacy far different from what he intended, and he will saddle his successor with a world far more dangerous than it was when the Clinton/Gore administration took office. **This article was adapted from the longer version that appears in the current issue of the Nation (www.thenation.com).
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